The Wario Land 4 Graphics Project

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As you may have realised, trying to find backgrounds and tilesets from Wario Land 4 is not the easiest thing i the world. So to change all this, I'm going to start a very interesting (and hopefully useful) project for all those Wario Land fans out there.

I'm going to (thanks to help of screenshots, maps and emulators), rip every single tileset from Wario Land 4 in a format that lets you use it for fan games, ROM hacks and Super Mario Bros X projects. It shouldn't be too bad, maps of the levels exist and screenshots exist by the ton, and I've already ripped at least half of them for my own Mario game modding projects, so it's just going to be a matter of posting up sprite sheets as I get them.

Hope people will find it useful.

To start off, something I changed to PNG format from Mario Fan Games Galaxy, aka every single background in Wario Land 4:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67216205/WARIO_LAND_4_BACKGROUNDS.zip

If you need a preview, here are some pictures:

MONSOON_JUNGLE_2.png


DOODLE_WOODS.png


CURIOUS_FACTORY_1.png


ARABIAN_NIGHT.png


Hopefully the person who ripped them for Clickteam games won't mind me converting them to PNG format for everyone else.

So yeah, let the gfx stuff begin. It'll end up on the Wario fan site when it launches, but for now, how about I get a few suggestions for possible tilesets to release?
 
Hm...I'm trying to think what kinda graphics We don't have yet...
Pretty much all enemies and bosses have been ripped...Wario as well...

How aboouuut...
The sprites of Wario's hovercar and truck from the hard and super hard mode endings?
The seperate pieces that Dr. Arewo Stein's sprite is made of? I think the head, body, hands and feet were seperate sprites. ...maybe.
Some of the more radom things like....I dunno.
 
I'll get those later, but my initial plan is to get the level graphics up.

Still, here's a start. All bonus room tiles from the game, bar those that are level specific:

bonusroomtiles.png


Who knew that all slope tiles were based on the red version of the tileset? I didn't til I looked at pictures of all the bonus rooms...

P.S. The blue backgrounds are to highlight the 16 x 16 boxes around certain objects, for fan game makers and ROM hackers.
 
Update, here are the tiles from Pinball Zone.

Yeah I didn't get the animation (I'll get it from Spriters Resource or something when it returns), but this is as close to a full tileset as you'll likely ever see:

pinballzonetileset.png
 
Also note that the weird background colours are to show the 'edge' of the tiles, so that anyone ripping them from the sheet for fan games or ROM hacks knows where each part of the foreground/background starts and ends. So consider any Microsoft Paint default colours here as transparent.
 
Please note: I'm still ripping these, so that ShyGuyXXL can make some randomised headers for Wario Weekly. I'll have another few up soon.
 
Golden Passage sprites now ripped:

goldenpassagesprites.png


Minute the torch animations, that should be pretty much everything (background stuff should be in the pack in the first post).
 
Daniel Primed said:
Wow. I didn't recognise some of the backgrounds at first. It's really different seeing them isolated like this.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's certainly a different way of seeing them. Also, it makes you appreciate the game even more to be honest, since you realise just how much work went into every tileset and background.
 
Bump, cause I'm still working on this. Just that the next few target levels (like Arabian Night) are absolutely huge, and have hundreds of different tiles to rip.
 
Oh hey, Arabian Night's interior tiles:

arabiannighttiles.png


Yay. This took forever to rip, due to the really, really awkward way the foreground tiles. No, no kidding. Three or four layers of 16 x 16 tiles for every piece of ground, and set up in such a ridiculously convoluted pattern that even Nintendo failed to tile them properly in about 98% of the level.
 
Well, since I've been ripping some of the game's graphics for Mario's Nightmare Quest, have a few new tilesets:

Mystic Lake

laketiles.png


mysticlakecavetiles.png


The box dictates the collision boundaries for the tiles, assuming they fit a 16 x 16 grid.

Notice anything interesting?

I did:

1. There are actually fairly few tiles in total. Indeed, most of the tiles in both tilesets are X and Y flipped versions of each other, including a few I didn't included above. It's so much the case that my Mystic Lake tileset in my ROM hack literally fits into under 2 4KB GFX files.

It's made up for by the backgrounds being utterly massive and presumably taking up most of the environment graphics space in RAM or whatever. Strangely enough, it seems to be the same as many arcade games in this sense; I was ripping some graphics from Willow (an arcade game based on an old fantasy movie) and noticed that the foreground was tiny yet the backgrounds were absolutely gigantic. It meant the foregrounds easily fit in a SNES game, yet the backgrounds were outright impossible.

Wario Land 4 isn't this bad in terms of background size (with the exception of Wildflower Fields, the backgrounds and foregrounds can be used together on screen at once in a SMW hack), but it's a notable technical/artistic design decision.

2. The devs really LOVED using multiple layers and a ton of parallax scrolling. In the cave section alone, you have the foreground, HDMA/semi transparent water, a rock wall foreground layer and the actual level background, all presumably on seperate layers. A SNES probably couldn't handle this easily, so I just put the foreground and water on one layer, the background on another and cut the rock wall effect.

3. The foregrounds have been really poorly assembled in some levels. For instance, if you look at the maps on VG Maps, you'll notice that absolutely none of Mystic Lake's areas have a ceiling which doesn't cut off at semi random. Seriously, look at this picture from a video of the level:

warioland4cutoff.jpg


Every marked point has cut off tiles. And there's at least two or three more in the same picture. The rock foreground here was just so poorly assembled/designed that it never, ever continues in an aesthetically pleasing way.

This may also be true of other levels, Monsoon Jungle and Arabian Night have odd foreground choices that don't really ever match up properly.

4. The collision detection for certain levels in this game is kind of poor. It's not noticeable so much in game (cause Wario is such a big fellow that he'd slightly clip into the walls in any 2D platformer), but both Mystic Lake and Monsoon Jungle have a really messed up 'grid' when it comes to what bits of the tiles are solid. It seems to be an issue with the Emerald Passage levels, because the graphics are meant to feel 'naturalistic' and hence free of harsh lines and boxes. The Ruby, Topaz and Sapphire passages pretty much don't have this because most of their tiles are exactly square or rectangular.
 
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